Since the introduction of PC-based layout and publishing software in the late-1980's, the explosive growth of this market has underscored graphic design as a vital component of effective business communications. The information explosion has resulted in hundreds of messages--many enriched with clip art, custom illustrations, and scanned images--vying for attention across a wide variety of media (print, electronic, multimedia, etc.). Businesses have a significant need to visually differentiate their documents above the market noise. Pages that emphasize content with minimal attention to formatting, illustrations, layout, and visual appeal, will no longer attract the attention of increasingly sophisticated business audiences. Business users competing for readers' time now place a premium on creating and publishing graphically attractive communications.
The proliferation of software tools, ready-made content (e.g. on-line photo libraries and CD-ROM disks of clip art), and desktop peripherals (e.g. color printers and scanners), have made attractive content and output affordable for anyone with a personal computer. In addition, the Internet has had a profound impact on both the breadth of content and distribution opportunities. However, producing professional-quality materials for disparate media, including the Internet, requires design expertise, a variety of authoring tools, and advanced computer skills; a rare combination among most business people. Home and small business users in particular--already taxed for time to cover multiple business roles--seldom have the time or the tools needed to enhance their design and computer expertise.
To assist in the creation of materials, a number of word processing programs, desktop publishing tools, internet authoring tools and the like have been developed. Many of the word processing programs allow the user to include tables, columns and rudimentary graphics within a document, however, they are typically not designed to easily facilitate sophisticated document formatting. Desktop publishing tools can assist a user in preparing and formatting more sophisticated documents, as well as outputting the document onto a medium such as a printed page, a computer screen or other. However, current software publishing tools still require that the user manually change the layout and formatting or modify the content if the document needs to be output to a different media. Likewise, if the user wishes to change the design, or wishes to change the layout and formatting, the user must often manually modify the content of the document in order to fit the new design or layout. This manual modification of content or layout is time consuming and tedious for the user.
A variety of word-processing, desktop publishing, and Internet authoring applications claim to streamline document production. Each of these products partially succeeds, but with significant limitations. For example, current software publishing packages allow a user to author a document once, but do not allow the user to automatically publish to any desired format without some manual intervention by the user. For example, the Pagemaker software by Adobe Systems, Inc. is one approach to solving the problem of automating manual paste-up. Pagemaker can be used to create elaborate documents, as long as the user is already a skilled graphic designer. However, Pagemaker is unable to automatically turn text and pictures into sophisticated designs on its own. Likewise, the Adobe Acrobat software addresses the problem of imitating paper documents on screen. However, Acrobat still does not allow for automatic redesign or reformatting based upon changing an output media. The Internet Studio software available from Microsoft Corporation is able to take a document and to separate form from content. However, this software is only capable of producing Web pages. If the user desires to take the same information and turn it into a different media such as a data sheet, a manual or a brochure, the user must manually do all of the reformatting his or herself.
In addition to the inability to automatically adjust content and/or design for a desired media, prior art software tools typically only provide a two-way separation between the form and content of a document. In these prior art tools, content structure is typically related to the output media, and the content structure is also tagged as to how it should be presented in the output media. This presents problems when the same content must be rendered in different output media. In addition, other software tools may be able to render a document into a different media, but are unable to maintain the original design and the relationship between the content elements of that original design.
Also, SGML-based tools and style sheet tools (included with many word processors and desktop publishing tools) may allow the intent of content structures to be recorded as tags, but do not allow a specific design to saved and reused, and automatically rendered to a medium. Also, database packages, other forms packages, report packages and "long document" systems (such as Interleaf) have a variety of drawbacks. They do not provide computation-intensive solutions to a design problem such as global fitting, flexible design changes or media changes. They do not support rich design structures, nor do they support interactive experimentation. Also, they do not allow for repurposing/multipurposing among different media.
Therefore, it would be desirable for a user to be able to author a document once, and then have tree and component data structures for adapting the document automatically for changes in the content, design or output media while maintaining the relationships between the content elements of the document.